"IS ANYBODY PAYING ATTENTION?" The mindful view of an educated Buddhist blogger who uses critical thinking, evidence, facts, and investigation to come up with his opinions instead of fear based ideologies.

Friday, February 22, 2013

I won't insult you by trying to tell you what I think of your misinformed opinion. Alternative fuels won't ruin the economy. Big Oil making more billions of dollars a year won't be worth much if we can't breathe. There is no "JURY STILL OUT" on climate change as you know we have all the scientists in all the world telling us the XL pipeline will be (from the NASA scientists) game over for the planet if we use that much of our gas supply. Fracking must be stopped because of environmental concerns about the waste it produces. We don't have another planet when we ruin the environment on this one. I don't know what you were thinking but switching from oxygen poor to oxygen rich safety measures CAN BE INSTITUTED BY GOVERNMENT and if they are not, then you will be killing your constituency. You can have your own opinion, based on things that have no proof, but you can't have your own reality where we all live in the Cleaver household and everything is great. Your denial is one more example that the Republicans don't need to change their message, they need to start acting like they have a brain and change their policies that are hurting our society. Trees and plants provide oxygen and we've torn all that down to make junk mail. So we have no oxygen going into the atmosphere and we are breathing what is left. The world is over populated because of people who think abortion and birth control are "evil" and that will have to stop before the whole world becomes like third world nations with thousands of starving masses and that is where the U.S. is headed soon. I don't know why you think lying about all this on television makes it so. Saying things are a certain way only makes it like that in the minds of the delusional. Insanity is described as repeating the same action, each time expecting a different result. Republican failed policies are NOT going to work, someday maybe like the trailer park reject redneck morons think it will. Supply side spending only works for those at the top and only for a while because conditions being perfect, the cost of living going down, wages and jobs going up, and everyone working and being prosperous and paying income taxes and NO ONE CHEATING or exploiting the system the way the banks and large corporations do on grand scales, so it isn't going to work because it doesn't take one aspect of American traditions into respect and that is Unlimited Greed. Fix your attitude, fix your policies to match, then worry about what you say or you will always have to lie.

Monday, February 18, 2013

John McCain and many other Republican politicians suffer from something I call the "sucker denial syndrome" that I will explain. Everyone remembers someone who we all considered kind of arrogant while being insecure, and while also seeming to be constantly indecisive about most things. There were times when we all have been tricked into buying a ticket to a movie, a play, a musical performance, an art show, or some other form of public entertainment. I mean we were coerced to buy admission by advertising, hype, previews that later seemed to be the only entertaining part of a movie or show that was even slightly something we wanted to see. I have rented movies, bought books, even breakfast cereal because of the picture on the outside of the box.
We also know people who seem so insecure that they seem embarrassed to admit that they ever made a mistake in judgement. At least once in our lives, we have known someone who went to see the same movie or play that many people went to see, all of us being disappointed when the story or acting wasn't up to par with what we consider a good performance. Also, there is always someone who doesn't want to admit that he got tricked into going to see it, and it is like they don't want to admit being as gullible as the majority so they tell you why they enjoyed it. They memorize a weakly glamorized account of certain parts of it along with a handful of reasons that it meant "more to them" than it did to most people. They just don't want to admit that, like the rest of us, they got duped into paying for something that really sucked.
I liken many conservatives to that same type of denial. John McCain fought in Vietnam and considers it an insult to himself and other people to admit that many people died in that war, that he himself was captured and spent time as a prisoner of war during, and that the main reason we went to war in Vietnam is a mystery to most of us. Previous to the war, President Ike Eisenhower had taken a poll and found that South Vietnam was already at least 95 percent pro-communist, so, who were we really fighting for in Vietnam? We wanted to create an American "brand" so to speak, in all of Indonesia by taking over. We were fighting with people who were dug in and had the home court advantage and also knew guerrilla warfare like we had never seen before. If you want to know how sickeningly primative their ideology was, just look up the words Punji Stick and read about what things they were soaked in.
John McCain was served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. His father and grandfather were both Admirals in the Navy and so, he had an easier time of survival while being young and impetuous than most men his age. He has built his career on being a "hero" in Vietnam, despite the fact that he was flying in a restricted zone when shot down, and he had lost four planes previous to the one he was shot down in. It is my opinion that if he hadn't been the son and grandson of longtime veterans who were ranking admirals in the Navy that he probably would have been washed out in his first two years. But when he returned home, he was touted by a local Republican in Arizona, the owner of Hensley Trucking, as a "hero" who was in a POW camp and returned somewhat injured and physically disabled.
He also voted for "The Surge" (the dramatic sounding rhetoric name) in Iraq along with the members of the Bush Administration that many feel today should be labled as "war criminals". Most Americans, after seeing later on that we were tricked into being at least "supportive" of going after Sadaam Hussein, realize that we were sent to war under false pretenses. No one I know believes that Sadaam had a single thing to do with the 9/11 attacks, but Dick Cheney was still saying that, as late as the debate with John Kerry, during which time Senator Kerry asked very loudly, "When are you going to quit saying that?" Sadaam Hussein, according to everyone I read or hear now, was a sworn enemy and ideological opponent of Bin Laden so the two of them would NEVER have had anything to do with each other, and we really don't need to keep beating the dead horse about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that caused the head of the CIA at the time to resign for being the one who told the U.S. that the WMD were a "slam dunk" situational fact. We now know through General Wesley Clark that the Bush administration already had become an ideological foreign policy coups and that they planned to invade and take over seven countries in five years, and that those plans were made by them much previous to the 9/11 attacks and that the attack was the opportunity they needed to put their plans into motion.
John McCain doesn't want to admit that he got tricked, like many of us were, into believing that the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney/Donald Rumsfeld fantasy "security threats" were merely fiction used to lead us to war in order for them to profit from their holdings in large security, oil, munitions, and military supply corporations. He is talking about Benghazi and Chuck Hagel's statement about "the surge" in Iraq being a mistake "similar to Vietnam" as if the two things are related. He is launching a personal agenda campaign against a man (Hagel) who was previously his friend - that he himself (McCain) had suggested would make a good secretary of state. This immature posturing and fanfare political drama is only about his own being embarrassed to admit that he was on the wrong side of the war issues for both Vietnam and Iraq and Hagel had the common sense and decency to admit he was wrong. McCain seems incapable of doing that very thing, admitting when he was wrong. So, instead of doing what is best for the country, the Republicans are opposing something that was actually their idea a while back. This is for one reason and one reason only. To try to find something the public will support them on that is in opposition of something the president is for. His hate and immature tantrums are holding back progress in this country. I don't know if his whole party is following suit or if in fact, they are the ones leading the charge and he is following suit but this divisive argumentative destructive openly hateful scorn like a jealous troll in a fantasy fairy tale is becoming obvious to everyone and even the mainstream media who usually gives Republicans great latitude, in not confronting their immature behavior, is talking about it.
All I have to say to any of them is four words.
Grow The Fuck UP.

This is in response to those of you who are complaining in social media about "drone attacks" launched by the commander and chief of our armed forces in protection of our national security. This definitely isn't a daily occurrence and similar to a "new toy" concept that the president is using. The war hawks that are complaining the loudest about this are the same ones who would prefer that we use our military (thousands of troops) to invade and attack a whole country needlessly. These are the same people who sent us to war in Iraq based on false premises and are still trying to argue that it was a good idea. The majority of this country doesn't think so. I like the idea of using mechanical means of attacking a small group of people instead of wiping out a whole town with carpet bombing and invading a whole country like we did previously, sending young American men and women into a meat grinder of insurgent guerrilla warfare - and the aftermath that is certain afterwards because of the unrest we cause by killing thousands of innocent men, women, and children so the president at the time could create a photo opportunity for himself and stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a sign boasting "Mission Accomplished".

If you fire one bullet there can be significant "collateral damage" and people in power have to weigh those options before they attack anyone. The people that President Obama sent drones to kill were all terrorists and criminals that were considered armed and dangerous. Using the U.S. military to handle a police action is tantamount to using a broadsword to lance a boil. The same people who are acting "up in arms" about the drone attacks are envisioning the president using them (drones) in the U.S. against U.S. Citizens. That is the main basis for their argument that using drones at all is wrong.
That would be completely ridiculous for the president to do when we have all of our own police agencies to handle those kinds of criminals here while in other countries, we don't have that kind of cooperation or manpower from the local authorities and we, in my opinion, are better off targeting the few people who are at fault instead of waging war on a whole country. Before you run your mouth about something you don't have the slightest clue about, I want you to imagine for a minute what it would be like to be our president. The American people are expecting you to protect them. A military or international police agency agent comes to the White House and gives you the location of an international terrorist and the joint chiefs of staff give you a heads up that a drone attack would be the most non invasive (on a national scale) tactic that would raise less diplomatic problems of a foreign incident nature. The national authorities in that country tell you that they agree this is a dangerous criminal and they are wary of trying to apprehend him/her/them without great danger to their citizens. They prefer you handle it. You set it in motion and kill the threat. We are only able to arrest, detain, and try people through our system of due process in this country.
Using the non-real scenario of "What if they start doing it here?" which is a logical fallacy straw man argument because no one is intending to make national security a threat to our own national security so you might as well be arguing about what Mothra and Godzilla could do to each other and which one would win, since they are both the same "non-reality" scenario mental exercise in mental masturbation. If you have nothing better to do, save your arguments for a real discussion that you have some researched "facts" to support instead of whining about something that will never happen.

Monday, February 11, 2013

"You and John McCain and Joe Lieberman are NOT in charge of national security and it would be nice if you let them do their job and quit wasting the country's time with your pandering and political circus propaganda filibusters that don't do anything but make you look ignorant.
A) Paul Ryan and the tea baggers defunded a whole bunch of the embassy security that the national financial problems started by your party letting George W. Bush start two wars under false pretenses without raising taxes to pay for it. Getting rid of Social Security so you don't have to pay back the money your party stole out of it isn't going to happen.
B) No one elected you to be "IN CHARGE OF" security briefings, written by the CIA and read by the White House. Attacking the president as if he threw a bomb at the embassy is a stupid waste of time and no one in the public believes it was his fault and the nation is sick of attacks on the president because he won't support tax cuts for rich people. Mitt Romney already stuck his head in this noose. But I do want to thank you for making yourself a target for your next election, as someone we (The whole damn nation, not a handful of rich out of touch moron politicians.) need to get rid of on the next Rotation. I guess you didn't get the picture during the recent presidential election. Keep your head down or it will be gone soon. You are self destructing, not only as a politician, but making your party look corrupted and ignorant.
Thank you so much,
A concerned voter"
I suggest that EVERYONE write to Lindsey Graham to let him know we are sick of him and the rest of the Republican goons wasting our country's time which should be spent on progress. You can contact him at : http://lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.LandingPage

About Me

I am an Arizona native, born and raised in Phoenix, although I have lived for brief times in other places. I am what one would call a Centrist. I don't believe in radical left or right stances and refuse to let the low information, regressive, right wing people call me "liberal" since that would be left of reality based on opinion, and I believe in facts and research of evidence.